Hi gang. Seeking some input on the best way to improve my storage situation. I’m currently running a pretty well-outfitted win 10 desktop PC on which runs my PMS. The PMS is installed on an SSD drive (“C”) alongside windows and some other programs. My media (currently @ 2.5 TB worth of movies and TV) sits on a single 3TB internal HDD (“D”). I also have a 2-drive 3TB NAS unit, and my media files get copied to there for redundancy, should my internal D drive fail. With space starting to run out on D (and the external NAS), I’m considering where to go from here.
I know there are 6TB and larger drives available now. I’m also intrigued by StableBit DrivePool.
My primary goals:
Increase storage capacity beyond 3TB
Ensure I have at least two copies of my most important media (e.g. blu-ray rips - I don’t want do those again)
If possible, I’d prefer not to waste the perfectly good drives i have now. I hate throwing away 3 to get 6. I’d prefer 9.
I run a 4 disk - 3TB per disk RAID-5 as my primary storage pool. This gives me approximately 9TB of storage and will still allow me to access my data if a disk goes out while I replace the disk and re-sync.
I then use a nightly cronjob to backup the RAID-5 to a separate internal 8TB drive as “RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!”
For extra peace of mind, I keep a large external hard drive that I encrypted and leave in my desk drawer at work. I usually bring that home once a month to backup to that as well. This gives me 3 copies of everything, offsite backup, and can keep me up and running 100%.
Some may say it’s overkill, it just depends on how important your data is to you.
@gregrobinsonhd said:
Hi gang. Seeking some input on the best way to improve my storage situation. I’m currently running a pretty well-outfitted win 10 desktop PC on which runs my PMS. The PMS is installed on an SSD drive (“C”) alongside windows and some other programs. My media (currently @ 2.5 TB worth of movies and TV) sits on a single 3TB internal HDD (“D”). I also have a 2-drive 3TB NAS unit, and my media files get copied to there for redundancy, should my internal D drive fail. With space starting to run out on D (and the external NAS), I’m considering where to go from here.
I know there are 6TB and larger drives available now. I’m also intrigued by StableBit DrivePool.
My primary goals:
Increase storage capacity beyond 3TB
Ensure I have at least two copies of my most important media (e.g. blu-ray rips - I don’t want do those again)
If possible, I’d prefer not to waste the perfectly good drives i have now. I hate throwing away 3 to get 6. I’d prefer 9.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
Well there are plenty of options.
Anyways seeing as you mention StableBit Drivepool. I have been running it since pre beta.
There is no parity like raid (though it can be achieved with others programs running on top to provide it)
It will however give you the option to duplicate individual files to the level you require 2x, 3x, 4x etc.So if yiou only want to duplicate some files it will be ideal. This can also be done on a folder basis. Also Drivepool really doesn’t care what size the individual drives are. You can happily keep using your existing drives and add larger disks when it suits.
Personally i have an extremely large case as i have no interest in having USB drives hanging out of every USB port.But I guess that all comes down to you motherboards sata port capacity.
Just add the 6TB drive beside the other drive into your PC.
(if the case is big enough and you have another SATA connector available.)
Then create a new folder on the new drive for each of your libraries in Plex.
Then edit each of your libraries and add one of the corresponding new folders to the library.
You can go a long way in this manner until DrivePool starts to make sense.
@OttoKerner said:
Just add the 6TB drive beside the other drive into your PC.
(if the case is big enough and you have another SATA connector available.)
Then create a new folder on the new drive for each of your libraries in Plex.
Then edit each of your libraries and add one of the corresponding new folders to the library.
You can go a long way in this manner until DrivePool starts to make sense.
@Otto - I’m not sure I follow. Are you suggesting just adding a second hard drive? That would accomplish my first goal of increasing storage capacity, but it doesn’t help with my need for redundancy. Unless I’m not understanding your suggestion. As for my NAS, I was kinda hoping to stop using my NAS for Plex purposes, so buying another NAS is not my preferred solution. (I guess I should have mentioned that up top.)
I, too, use DrivePool. I have a 50tb pool with 11 USB drives in it. I use 2X duplication in DrivePool to prevent the loss of any single drive from causing the loss of any data. I also have a separate backup that I use to prevent loss from accidental deletion. Remember that redundancy, like DrivePool has, is NOT a backup solution.
I have had a couple of drive failures over the years in my pool and I have never had any interruption of service and all I had to do was plug a new drive into my computer and tell DrivePool to use it and within a day or two the pool was back just like it was before the failure. That is there was no interruption of service for my media at all.
I even had a computer fail on me and all I had to do was get a new computer and install DrivePool on it and plug in the old USB drives and the pool was recreated intact and everything was just as it was before the crash. No reformating or restoring from backup or jumping through any other hoops was required. It just worked.
I can strongly recommend DrivePool for creating large reliable drives.
The only thing is you should NEVER EVER put the Plex data directory inside the pool. It mot only will not work well but it will corrupt the Plex database quite quickly.
Thanks @Elijah_Baley . I do like what I’ve read on DrivePool. Sounds pretty effective. Any thoughts on how DrivePool compares to a larger (4+ bay) NAS? What are the major differences? I guess I need to read up on it some more.
One question: can other machines on your home network use the DrivePool? Between my wife and I, we have 2 desktops and 2 laptops (including my main desktop which runs my PMS) and I’d love everyone to save EVERYTHING (docs, pics, music, etc) to a central location (NAS or DrivePool) so I can stop fighting with the “did I save locally?” question and reduce the risk of losing or misplacing something important.
Simply put, DrivePool lies to the OS that a bunch of disks are a single drive. As such, YES, you can share out that drive across your network.
I have an old server tower that has 13 physical drives in a single pool (using drivepool) acting as my media NAS. Plex actually runs on a different server and all access to the media files is across the wire. In essence, I made my own NAS using drivepool.
Thanks @sGarver that’s good to know. is there anything a NAS gives you that Drivepool does not? Maybe just the fact that a NAS can live as a standalone device, whereas drivepool requires a full blown PC, windows license, etc? thanks again!
I was saying adding a single drive will provide more storage capacity.
Adding Drivepool for redundancy will only protect you from single drive failures. All the other sources of data loss are not covered by such a solution.
As the old saying goes: “RAID is not backup”
For “backup” you need a full copy of your files on a separate system, preferably in a separate room/house/city.
If your network connection is reasonable then you can forget about local storage & all the expense & worry of hardware failures & backup & management that entails. Just move all your media to the Cloud. G Suite for Business for $10/month gives unlimited storage on Google Drive (some of their promotional material refers to a 1TB limit for less than 5 users but this has never been enforced). There are various solutions for mounting you Google Drive on Windows e.g. Netdrive.
@gregrobinsonhd said:
Thanks @Elijah_Baley . I do like what I’ve read on DrivePool. Sounds pretty effective. Any thoughts on how DrivePool compares to a larger (4+ bay) NAS? What are the major differences? I guess I need to read up on it some more.
One question: can other machines on your home network use the DrivePool? Between my wife and I, we have 2 desktops and 2 laptops (including my main desktop which runs my PMS) and I’d love everyone to save EVERYTHING (docs, pics, music, etc) to a central location (NAS or DrivePool) so I can stop fighting with the “did I save locally?” question and reduce the risk of losing or misplacing something important.
DrivePoll and a NAS are quite different animals that serve the same purpose (mostly). A NAS generally requires that all drives are the same size and it encrypts the information on the drive so that it can only be read when attached to the NAS and if your NAS fails you have pretty much lost everything because a drive in a NAS mostly cannot be read by a computer and for most NAS systems you cannot even get an identical NAS and put the drives from a failed NAS in it and recover the data.
With DrivePool if you loose the computer it is running on you can simply attach the drives to another computer and install DrivePool and the pool will automagically be recreated and all your data will be back just like it was. More that that if you need you can read each drive without using the DrivePool software at all. The files in DrivePool are stored in standard Windows format and can be read on any computer without the need for the DrivePool software at all.
For your other question: As others gave said once the pool is created then it looks to the computer just like another drive and iy can be shared and managed on the Network just like any other drive.
My fairly large pool (50 tb) is on a different computer from my Plex server and the pool is shared and Plex has no trouble using the shared pool drive. I had my Plex server and DrivePool on the same computer for some time but last year I decided that, for management reasons, I was better served by having different computers for the two purposes. The original computer worked OK but it was a bit under-powered for Plex and adding the, pretty small, overhead for DrivePool pushed it to where it sometimes lagged just a bit, mainly when I was performing some maintenance. I just like, as much as possible, keeping my computers to single tasks and the support needed for that task.
One more thing: You can have multiple pools on the same computer if you want to keep things like personal data separate from your media library. I have not found the need for that but I have tested multiple pools and they work fine. For a while I tested using a second pool as a backup with that pool attached to the computer with a long USB cable to a hub with several drives attached.That work pretty well but I decided I wanted my backup yo be more isolated so I abandoned that to another backup solution that stores my data in a fireproof safe. I run the backup weekly and store the whole backup system in the fireproof safe it a different room from my server.
@Elijah_Baley said:
most NAS systems you cannot even get an identical NAS and put the drives from a failed NAS in it and recover the data.
I was thinking about using one of my old 4-bay NAS as a simple JBOD and use DrivePool for the “RAID”. I think this will work as I won’t need to worry about the whole RAID configuration and the difficulties on finding the exact replacement NAS when it decides to fail.
@Elijah_Baley said:
most NAS systems you cannot even get an identical NAS and put the drives from a failed NAS in it and recover the data.
I was thinking about using one of my old 4-bay NAS as a simple JBOD and use DrivePool for the “RAID”. I think this will work as I won’t need to worry about the whole RAID configuration and the difficulties on finding the exact replacement NAS when it decides to fail.
What do you think?
“What do you think?”
I try to avoid thinking. It is not something I want to start at my advanced years.
But I believe what you want to do could work. I know that there are many NAS systems that allow that and when set as JBOD do not really use and encryption BUT remember that DrivePool will be better served if it simply sees separate disks. I also have a concern that DrivePool may not even run on the NAS.
I do know that DrivePool works well with drives in many/most USB enclosures where several drives in one enclosure are made to appear as several USB drives and attached to a computer with a single USB cable.
@Elijah_Baley said:
I also have a concern that DrivePool may not even run on the NAS.
You do have a point. Did some digging and found SB tech support forum.
an excerpt
As for not supporting network drives/shares directly from StableBit DrivePool, there are a number of reasons for this.
The first is that that we’re unable to determine physical location/layout of the drives. This is important, but it does no good to put files on multiple different shares, if they’re located on the same physical drive on the remote system… as both copies would be lost.
Additionally, where the driver is located. StableBit DrivePool is a kernel driver, whereas Drive Bender is a user mode driver. This adds different requirements, profiles, etc. IIRC, “in the kernel” is much more sensitive to IO delays and the like. Allowing network shares here would potentially cause all sorts of problems, and introduce stability issues. (as network connections can be finicky or take a long time)
RAID 1 is redundancy in it’s definition. RAID 1 = mirroring. Whatever is written on one drive, is written on a second drive. There is an advantage and disadvantage to this. First, if you write something corrupt to the RAID, you are mirroring that corrupted file to the mirror drive. Advantage is, if one of those drives fail, you still have your data on the other drive. Second, it can get relatively expensive because you are having to double your expected storage in order to mirror it.
I currently have 12x4TB in RAID 01 configuration. Striped and Mirrored. If one of my drive fails, I can pull it and slap a new one in and it will automatically build the new drive into the array, no loss of data. The bad thing is, I’m limited to only 24TB instead of the 48TB because I’m using half my storage space, to mirror the other half.
Which, if/when I build my new one, I may do away with raid 1 because all my media I either have a CD/DVD/BD hard copy, or it’s obtainable via iTunes, etc. Or maybe build one just like my current one and have dual 10G fiber links and mirror from one server to the second server. hehehe
@Taimaishoo said:
RAID 1 is redundancy in it’s definition. RAID 1 = mirroring. Whatever is written on one drive, is written on a second drive. There is an advantage and disadvantage to this. First, if you write something corrupt to the RAID, you are mirroring that corrupted file to the mirror drive. Advantage is, if one of those drives fail, you still have your data on the other drive. Second, it can get relatively expensive because you are having to double your expected storage in order to mirror it.
I currently have 12x4TB in RAID 01 configuration. Striped and Mirrored. If one of my drive fails, I can pull it and slap a new one in and it will automatically build the new drive into the array, no loss of data. The bad thing is, I’m limited to only 24TB instead of the 48TB because I’m using half my storage space, to mirror the other half.
Which, if/when I build my new one, I may do away with raid 1 because all my media I either have a CD/DVD/BD hard copy, or it’s obtainable via iTunes, etc. Or maybe build one just like my current one and have dual 10G fiber links and mirror from one server to the second server. hehehe
RAID-5 or some variant thereof is best suited to your situation. Using one or two parity disks will allow you to ride through disk failure just as you do now. Depending on the actual RAID implementation these may literally be individual disks or the parity information may be striped across all disks. In your case you could have two parity disks leaving ten disks for data so giving 40TB instead of your current 24TB.
